A Good Cheap Book: Christopher Hitchens, A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq

(New York: Plume/Penguin, 2003),
vi + 104 pp., paperback, $8.99.

Irfan
Khawaja

Christopher Hitchens’s A
Long Short War (ALSW)
is a chronicle and justification of “Operation Iraqi
Freedom,” consisting of twenty-four brief essays
written (mostly) for the online magazine Slate
between November 2002 and April 2003. The idea behind
the book, Hitchens writes in the Preface, “was to test
short-term analyses against longer-term ones, while
simultaneously subjecting long-term positions or
convictions to shorter-term challenges” (v). Having
set this task for himself, Hitchens brings a
characteristic ferocity and rigor while delivering on
it—managing, in about a hundred breezy pages, to rebut
virtually every argument against the war, assemble the
arguments for it, and raise some interesting
philosophical questions along the way.

More nonsense has been written
about the Iraq war than on almost any subject since the
Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and it’s merely stating a
fact that the bulk of this nonsense has come from the
Left, even when the Left’s lapdogs on the Right have
slurped it up and regurgitated it. Self-contradiction,
defamation, disinformation and evasion: seek and ye
shall find it all in the pages of Cairo’s Al Ahram
Weekly, Counterpunch,
The Nation, or for that matter the Op-Ed pages of The
Washington Post and The
New York Times. Never have so many obscured so much
by saying so little—and by saying it so badly.
Hitchens, no stranger to polemical dust-ups, lets loose
here with an impressive barrage of munitions, hitting
the right targets without much collateral damage.

The Introduction, written on the
eve of the war (March 18, 2003) is practically worth the
price of the book in this respect, compressing into
sixteen pages a deft riposte to virtually every anti-war
cliché or slogan you’ve heard in the last year or so.
I, for one, would like to hear those who condemn the war
on behalf of “the Arab world” deal intelligently
with widespread Iraqi-American support for it (1-3). And
it would be interesting to hear the
“Israel-is-behind-everything” conspiracy-mongers
confront Hitchens’s terse annihilation of their
insinuations (6-7). “It’s that Straussian-Jewish
neo-conservative cabal that’s hijacked U.S. policy,”
we’re told. How that accounts for the support of a
nominally Jewish Marxist like Hitchens is anybody’s
guess, not that it does very much to explain why the
Straussian-Jewish neo-conservative Paul Wolfowitz took a
stubbornly anti-Saddam line right through the Reagan
Administration (2, 17-18), when Jewish neo-conservatives
like Daniel Pipes were counseling a tilt toward Saddam, and big-name Straussians (Bloom, Jaffa, Pangle, etc.)
were obsessively focused not on Baghdad, but on “the
closing of the American mind.” “We have to give the
inspectors more time.” And how much more time would be
sufficient—another twelve years, say, with a four-year
vacation stuck in the middle of it? Or how about just
waiting until May 2003, when Iraq had had “enough
time” to assume chairmanship of the U.N. Committee on
Disarmament (10)? “But Saddam can be deterred.”
Aha—so that must be why he responded to our dire military threats by
blowing up the Kuwaiti oilfields (9)….

I’ll mention without belaboring
some of the other polemical triumphs of ALSW,
many them focused on the Left’s propensity for
specifically lexicographical obscurantism. “Most of Long
Short War is given over to parsing words,” writes
one of Hitchens’s critics with no small insinuation of
contempt. Indeed it is, and in ways that don’t exactly
flatter those who use words without being able to parse
or define them. A fair bit of Left discourse proceeds by
the mindless repetition of mantras based on undefined
and indefinable terms which, while denoting nothing in
particular, gradually come to acquire moral resonance
that serves to shock and awe the careless, the craven,
and the gullible. It takes a certain self-consciousness
and self-confidence to see through the semantic
confidence games here (intelligence helps, too) and more
often than not, Hitchens has what it takes to do the
job. His essays on “multilateralism and unilateralism”
(34-36), “evil” (40-42), Bush as “cowboy”
(57-59), the “drumbeat to war” (69-72), and the
“no war for oil” mantra (85-88) are particularly
astute.

Though I found Hitchens’s
critique of the anti-warriors persuasive, I was less
satisfied by the way he put the case for
war. In a cantankerous essay called “Chew on This,”
he lists three reasons: “The first is the flouting by
Saddam Hussein of every known law on genocide and human
rights….The second is the persistent effort by
Saddam’s dictatorship to acquire weapons of
genocide….The third is the continuous involvement by
the Iraqi secret police in the international underworld
of terror and destabilization”(54-5). The second and
third reasons, I think, combine to produce a fourth
reason more compelling than either of the two on their
own: if Saddam’s Iraq had acquired WMDs, it’s
entirely plausible to think that those weapons could
have been used against Americans with massive and lethal
effect via terrorist and secret service channels. Think,
in this context, of the March 1995 sarin gas attacks on
the Tokyo subway (11 dead, 5500 injured), or the as-yet
unresolved anthrax murders of the fall of 2001; what,
besides a full accounting of Iraq’s WMD
programs, would have precluded an Iraqi version of these
attacks, perhaps on a larger scale?

It’s worth bearing in mind that
Hans Blix & Co. repeatedly and explicitly
stressed—in hundreds of pages of otherwise cautiously
bureaucratic prose—that they could provide no certain accounting
of Iraq’s weapons. On dozens of issues discussed in
the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and
Inspection Commission’s (UNMOVIC) 173-page “Cluster
Document” of March 2003, the UN inspectors candidly
confessed their “uncertainty” regarding this or that
issue—where the “issues” in question included
Iraq’s possession or non-possession of anthrax, ricin,
botulinium toxin, VX nerve gas, sarin, tabun, and the
like. A typical sentence from an UNMOVIC report (one of
hundreds like it) tells us that the inspectors could not
“reduce uncertainty” about Iraq’s possession or
non-possession of WMDs until they began interviews,
unorganized as of February 2003, of possible Iraqi
personnel possibly involved in the alleged unilateral
destruction of the weapons—gleaned from a list of
personnel given to inspectors by…Iraq, which
admittedly, had provided a fraudulent 12,000-page list
of its weapons programs to the inspectors just three
months earlier (paragraph 70[e] of UNMOVIC Twelfth
Quarterly Report). Not exactly what I’d call a
truth-conducive research program. We might fairly ask,
then, how we were supposed to make provision for our
national security if the best we were going to
get from UNMOVIC was certainty of uncertainty. The only
way to approximate certainty on these issues was armed intervention, a fact
that Blix himself obliquely and grudgingly conceded in
an interview with the Toronto
Star (Sept. 21, 2003).

In this light, one trouble I have
with Hitchens’s argument is the priority he gives to
the liberationist as opposed to disarmament rationale
for war, a priority loudly trumpeted by the book’s
subtitle. The liberation of the Iraqi people, Hitchens
suggests, was the only genuinely “moral”
justification for war (18, 51); national self-interest,
by contrast, has no specifically moral standing
(14). He indulges in some grating anti-isolationist
rhetoric in this connection. It was “naïve,” he
remonstrates, for Americans to want to enjoy their
“peace dividend” after the Cold War (3): “there is
a self-satisfied isolationism to be found,” he
continues, wagging his finger at us, “which seems to
desire mainly a quiet life for Americans” (56).

Oh come now. Is there really
something so shameful about not wanting to go around
invading foreign countries, occupying them,
reconstructing them at a cost of $87 billion, and
incurring a daily-mounting toll of dead and mangled
bodies? It is after all Hitchens who bears the burden of
explaining why the desire for a quiet life must yield to
the duty to place that life at risk, and his
specifically liberationist argument is not the most
compelling reason I’ve ever heard for wanting to spend
time in the Sunni Triangle. The question is: why,
exactly, was the liberation of Iraq for Iraqis a
good enough reason to throw away our
peace dividend and our
quiet lives? I don’t see that it was, and I’m simply
not convinced by Hitchens’s table-thumpings on the
matter. Hitchens is on his strongest grounds, and is at
his best argumentatively, when he explicitly ties the
aims of the Iraq war to the imperatives of American
national security, and I hope he’ll focus on this
issue in more detail in future writings. (His three best
essays on this theme are “Inspecting
‘Inspections’” in ALSW,
along with “Saddahmer Hussein” [July 7, 2003] and
“Restating the Case for War” [Nov. 5, 2003], both of
the latter published in Slate.)

Having made these criticisms,
however, let me add that there is a good deal more to
cheer in this book than to criticize. And it’s a
measure of the inverted priorities of our political
culture that the book will undoubtedly be criticized
more than it’s cheered. That, in fact, is less a
prediction than a description: one doesn’t have to go
far to encounter the abuse that’s been flung at
Hitchens for the stance he’s taken in this book, or
for that matter for his views on terrorism, Islamism and
the malfeasances of the Left. “Racist,” “gunboat
militarist,” “Orientalist,” “drunk,”
“snitch,” and “sell-out,” are the standard
accusations, made in the first two cases by people whose
reputations Hitchens went out on a limb to defend (Noam
Chomsky and Edward Said respectively) and in the last
case by a scholar whose career he promoted when it
wasn’t exactly a fashion statement to do so (Norman
Finkelstein).

It’s somehow unsurprising in this
light that Chomsky and Said have been invited to deliver
the Eqbal Ahmad Lectures in Pakistan despite not having
written very much about the place—while Hitchens has
gone uninvited, despite the brilliance of what he’s
written about both India and Pakistan. Nor should it
surprise anyone that Finkelstein is glorified by
partisans of the Palestinian cause for his avowedly
self-immolating “solidarity” with Hezbullah, while
Hitchens’s defenses of Palestinian secularism and
moderation have gone ignored by people who accuse him of
being a “Zionist neoconservative.” (Never mind what
the Zionist neoconservatives think of him.) As
Shakespeare put it, wisdom and goodness to the vile seem
vile, but filth savors but itself (King
Lear, IV.2). A look at Hitchens’s critics,
especially but not exclusively on the Left, suggests the
extent to which filth has now become the currency of the
discursive realm.

A hundred years from now,
“Operation Iraqi Freedom” will most probably be
ancient history, covered, I suspect, in layers of
falsehood perceptible only to the conceptual equivalent
of an archaeologist. I can’t predict the future, but
I’d like to think that Hitchens’s little book will
serve as a sort of Rosetta Stone for the archaeologists
of the future—the indispensable tool for translating
the hieroglyphs of 2003 to the puzzled inquirers of the
twenty-second century. I don’t have the highest hopes
that those inquirers will make sense of what this war
was about, but if they do—and one hopes they will--
they will no doubt have Christopher Hitchens to thank
for it.

Irfan
Khawaja is Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University
and adjunct professor of philosophy at The College of
New Jersey. This is a much-abridged version of an essay
to appear in the journal Reason Papers, vol. 27, January
2004. For ordering information, go to http://webhost.bridgew.edu/askoble/RPad.htm.Do not reprint
without permission. Irfan Khawaja, (c) 2003.